After concept work on Battlefield Earth, Red Planet, two Star Wars prequels and The Astronauts Wife, poor old Stephan Martiniere sure could use a break. Okay, that’s not entirely fair – he also got to contribue to I, Robot which ended up being quite a clever film, at least in terms of it’s imagery.

One of his assignments appears to be character designs for a film of The Looking Glass War, the Frank BeddorAlice in Wonderland spin off that Charles Roven is currently shepherding towards the big screen. After the break, some big and frightening pictures of some dudes in armour that seem to be spoiling for a right royal ruckus, as well as Alyss Heart, Beddor’s heroine.

Frank Beddor has been in the news this week. First there was that awful, awful premise for Ridley Scott‘s movie version of Monopoly that Beddor wrote and explained to the LA Times. Now he’s taken to television to promote his latest book, and while there mentioned that Chuck Roven, one of the producers on The Dark Knight, is working on an adaptation of Beddor’s novel series The Looking Glass Wars. I haven’t read the books, perhaps they’re wonderful, but the revamped approach to Alice in Wonderland sounds just as terrible as the Monopoly pitch. Read More »

I thought I knew how a Monopoly movie could work, even what a Ridley ScottMonopoly movie would look like, but I didn’t expect anything like this. I’ll let Frank Beddor, the man behind the movie’s concept, lay it all out for you:

[H]e’s in this very vibrant place, Monopoly City, and he’s just come out of a Chance Shop. As it goes on, he takes on the evil Parker Brothers in the game of Monolopy. He has to defeat them. It tries to incorporate all the iconic imageries – a sports car pulls up, there’s someone on a horse, someone pushing a wheelbarrow – and rich Uncle Pennybags, you’re going to see him as the maître d’ at the restaurant and he’s the buggy driver and the local eccentric and the doorman at the opera. There’s all these sight gags.

Er… okay. So it’s like Zathura or Jumanji then? Not what I had in mind. After the break, who this “he” is, and how he will get himself into this surrealist scrape in the first place.